Thinking about poetry from the point of view of composition and personal reading

Saturday, 6 October 2012

F T
PRINCE

a
very brief memoir

John Haynes

F T Prince was my tutor both as an undergraduate and
as a masters student. I first met him
when he interviewed me for an undergraduate place. I had dropped out of school at the age of
sixteen and through correspondence during national service and between jobs as
a rep stage manager, unqualified
teacher, deck hand, and so on had
managed to get to teacher’s college, and so presented myself with rather vague
credentials. I cringe a little now when
I remember that with my application to Southampton I included some ‘notes’ I’d
been making about poetry. I recall Prince
being struck, he said, that no Romantics figured in my contemplations. He seemed to think that a good sign.

As a student I met him for tutorials, and although I
didn't take to him personally (and I think he thought me rather vulgar in my,
alas, overconfidence then, now lost) I was impressed to meet a ‘real poet’ but
never got onto anything like intimate terms with him. Except perhaps once, discussing the scansion
of a Wyatt poem. I find that, without
having made any effort to do so, I remember verbatim and can hear things he
said. As I’ve come to think about my
father, I have been much more influenced by him that I’ve acknowledged to
myself.

I’m now, looking over his work, surprised that so much
of his verse is not ‘free’. He’d been
interested in my interest in Pound and shared my admiration, although there was much he thought just rambled
about. He opened his Cantos to show me
number XXXVI, the Donna me Prega translation which he found wonderful.

A Lady asks me

I
speak in season

She seeks reason for an affect, wild often

That is so proud he have Love for a name

Why denys it can hear the truth now

Once when we were looking at a piece of free verse – I
don’t recall what it was - he was
puzzled as to the underlying rhythm.
When I said that perhaps there wasn’t one he was very firm that “there
damned well ought to be”. Eliot’s vers libre.
Though he felt that Eliot’s writings
about poetry shouldn’t be taken too earnestly, that they were useful to Eliot himself to get
himself going to write more poetry.

He always came back to Yeats as the great poet of the
twentieth century.

Although it didn’t strike me particularly at the time, one remark of his about free verse , that it was,”
something to do with the syntax,” he said, that counted, has stayed in my head
and I’ve found myself coming back and back to, especially when I got interested
in African traditional poetry (in translation) and the principle of parallelism
which Jacobson writes about so well. I
realize now, too, how I was taken with his discussion of Milton’s treatment of
the ten syllable (rather than pentameter) line in Paradise Lost, and I find
looking through his own poetry how well Prince uses the long sentence, with its
greater potential for intonational
rhythm and ‘tune’. *

I never dared ask him to read my verses after a first
gentle discouragement when he said that I’d probably be disappointed with his
response and anyway did I think anyone can teach anyone else how to write
poetry? One of those ‘questions
expecting the answer No.’

But he was pleased when I got some poems in London
Magazine, quite recently then having been taken over by Alan Ross. He had copies of this magazine and others on
a stand in his room. He thought my
first batch very ‘assured’, and the next batch to appear pleased him because he
the poems were in different ‘manners’ as he put it - ‘personae’,
perhaps. Naturally he was being
kind in all this but it showed a little of the very hidden real man, I
feel. After that he would invite me
round to his house for drinks if there
were every any poets coming to read or lecture.

He could be gently down-putting of the visiting poets
we sometimes had. Three poets came
once, and in his introduction he quoted a remarked (I don’t recall the source)
to the effect that modern poets disobey the laws of perspective. As they come nearer they get smaller. He didn’t quite share my enthusiasm for the
speech rhythms one of the readers, the
then ‘new’ John Fuller. But we did
sometimes agree about other poets. During questions at the end of a Charles
Tomlinson reading, I asked Tomlinson whether
he felt any affinity to the imagists.
No, said Tomlinson, he thought he

had more passion than them, but Prince smiled later,
saying to me, “He doesn’t see it!”

I was enthusiastic about Sylvia Plath and asked what
he thought of Berck Plage. He read it
and the next time we met asked me what I thought was so good about it. I said something about the imagery. He replied, “Yes, it hits you between the
eyes, doesn’t it?”

His Doors of Stone came out while I was still an
undergraduate and I did a review for Second Wessex, the university literary
magazine at the time. I think still I
was right to pick out the theme of ‘love’ as the unifying one, though it needs more qualification than I had
eyes for then. In the letter he wrote to
thank me, he was very kind, saying he was writing before he had too much time
to change in his own mind what I’d written, a way perhaps of avoiding too
critical a response. I was very moved
by the end of his letter, and of course
flattered. He wrote:

“Isn’t ours a somewhat awkward relationship, seeing
that I have to give you carefully calculated marks for examination scripts,
while you are giving me something of inestimable value – an intelligent
reading.”

This shows not only a marvellous generosity and indeed
humility on his part, but also a disjunction in his mind between the creative
and the academic. Though not at a psychological
level: I once asked him whether academic work interfered with his writing and
his response was, no more than any other job might. For him, he said, anyway a little
experience goes a long way.

He started the above letter, as he did later when he
wrote me a couple of times when I was in Nigeria, ‘Dear Haynes.’ We were never close, still less intimate,
except in a way he would have respected, even welcomed, that I find his words
coming back to me now, when I’m writing.

He gave me his pamphlet, Gravity and the Long Poem
(1962) we’d been discussing my ambition to write one. He, then, was thinking of the epic poem in
which “ideas go to war,” as he put it, while -
I recall us walking from the university towards Portswood where I’d catch my bus - I was thinking more of the Chaucer-like tale. At this point, as a poet, he hadn’t found his
natural comfort with the longish poem, as he would with his Dry Points and most
later poems. I was interested in his Yuan Chen Variations
both for themselves and for his interest in Arthur Waley, whom I raised with
him once because my own interest. I
recall his view that the Waley poems were a long way from the complex formalism
of the Chinese originals, and didn’t then get a sense of the admiration he
later showed.

Towards the end of our tutor-student relationship he
lent me some John Ashbery whom he admired, or so it seemed to me then, but I’ve
not, as yet, been able to tune in to Ashbery.
Not surprising as FTP was always very many steps ahead of me and always
kind enough never to make me feel it.
And yet in a remark to Anthony Rudolf Prince confesses to finding
Ashbery and others difficult to make sense of and says, for his part, “both my
strength and my burden is that I have to make sense”. Indeed.

One great regret is that I didn’t published my first
long poem, Letter to Patience, in time for him to see it. I was some three years too late. I would love
to have been able to send him a copy with a note saying, Look, Prof, I did it!

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*Perhaps to think a bit more about the role on 'tone' - in the sense of the particular kind of stress on which there is a change of pitch also, indicating the kind of continuity (particularly in the long sentence in which the reader may need to 'work out' the appropriate pitch movement), and linking rhythm and meaning music-like movement forward.